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Almost exactly twelve years ago I was moving with my parents to a new town.  It was the summer before my senior year and I agreed to pick up and move two weeks before the beginning of my last year in high school.  I was finally going to be a senior at the high school I had grown up in.  I had been waiting for this day for YEARS!  I loved my friends and my school.  My parents certainly would have understood if I had said no.  They would have found a way to let me stay behind and finish with my friends, or they would’ve passed up on the opportunities they had waited 20 years to come along (If I haven’t mentioned this yet, I have amazing parents who really would do anything for anyone of us).  Even with all of those reasons, all of the outs I could have taken, and all the chances they gave me to stay, something urged me to go.  I can’t explain it to you now.  It was one of the easiest decisions I have ever made.  That doesn’t mean it wasn’t difficult to leave, I was wrecked with the heaviness of one hundred goodbyes.  At no point, however, did I waiver on my choice.   

If you had asked me on that day if I thought I was about to meet the man I would fall in love with, marry, (and twelve years later) be expecting my first child with, I would have laughed.  If you had told me that one day I would make this place MY home, that my husband and I would plant seeds and grow roots here so deep that we could not imagine life anywhere else, I certainly would not have believed it.  The tri-cities was NOT my home.  Yakima was NOT my home.  The move from one to the next was just the first step out the door and into the real world.  I wanted to be on my own, far away, and free.  

Typical baby in the family, I was just dying to grow up.

This isn’t a small town but there is a slow peace to life here.  The home we live in is our home, built the year we were married.  Some people find the fanciest hotel room in town for their wedding night, but we wanted to go home together.  So we did.  We were a new family in our new home on the day of our wedding.  The significance of that choice sinks in more and more these days.  Soon our family will change again.  We will be bringing home another new DoValle.  Up those same steps, through that same door, and into our home and it will be his first home as well.  During these warm summer evenings, I sit on the couch reading through my maternity books and looking at my two handsome men (Ricardo and Poncy, of course) and I feel the kind of freedom I used to dream of when I first moved to this town.  Ricardo and I have already shared so many adventures together both here in our home town and traveling all over.  It is with so much joy that we anticipate the next adventure in our lives together.  

Wishing each of you a long, lazy, lingering end to a beautiful summer. . .